Stalin Merits No Memorial, But His Victims Do

Posted by Ilya Shapiro

I have written previously about the damnable decision to include a bust of Stalin in the new National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia.  An excerpt of my attack on this misguided move:

Memorials are monuments to fallen heroes, not historical dioramas. There is no statue of Stephen Douglas at the Lincoln Memorial, no bust of Wendell Willkie at the FDR Memorial, and no plaques honoring Axis dead at our WWII Memorial. Moreover — and perhaps most importantly from a historical perspective – Stalin had no role in D-Day; the invasion of Normandy by U.S., British, Canadian, Australian, Free French, and other Western forces.

While there is no question that Stalin, by virtue of commanding the army fighting on the Eastern Front, played an indispensable role in defeating Hitler, it should escape no one’s memory that he too was an evil, mass-murdering despot.

As it happens, this past Sunday was the anniversary of D-Day, so of course this travesty is in the news again.  Here’s a statement from Lee Edwards, chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation:

Clearly, the National D-Day Memorial Foundation knows it made a monumental mistake by including Stalin in its Memorial. It tried to justify its action by adding a plaque citing the tyrant’s “tens of millions of victims” and then to minimize it by privately installing the bust five days before the formal dedication of the D-Day Memorial on June 6.

But the Stalin bust remains as does the profound injury to the memory of those who launched a crusade for freedom in Europe in June 1944. The honorable thing for the National D-Day Memorial Foundation to do is to remove the bust without delay.

Felicitously, at 10 a.m. today there will be a wreath-laying at the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington (corner of Massachusetts Ave. and New Jersey Ave. NW):

 

This event will mark the memorial’s third anniversary, as well as signaling our continued vigilance against the deadliest ideology in human history. 

According to a VCMF press statement, at least 12 foreign embassies and nearly 20 ethnic organizations will lay wreaths in honor of the more than 100 million victims of Communism.  Among the invited speakers are Representatives Dan Lipinski of Illinois and Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan, Swedish MP Göran Lindblad, and Tiananmen Square activist Dr. Yang Jianli.  For more information, contact Jaron Janson or Steve Miller at at 202-536-2373 or vocmemorial@aol.com.

We Should Not Praise Stalin, But Bury Him

Posted by Ilya Shapiro

Although the debate has been raging for months, it has just come to my attention that the man responsible for the second-most number of murders ever – after Mao, of course, with Hitler a distant third – is to have his bust placed at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia.

Defenders of the Stalin bust argue that, whether we like it or not, our uneasy alliance with the Soviet Union during the war is a part of history and should be recognized. Furthermore, they say that his visage is in no way glorifying the man or his deeds.

This argument misses the point entirely. Memorials are monuments to fallen heroes, not historical dioramas. There is no statue of Stephen Douglas at the Lincoln Memorial, no bust of Wendell Willkie at the FDR Memorial, and no plaques honoring Axis dead at our WWII Memorial. Moreover — and perhaps most importantly from a historical perspective – Stalin had no role in D-Day; the invasion of Normandy by U.S., British, Canadian, Australian, Free French, and other Western forces.

While there is no question that Stalin, by virtue of commanding the army fighting on the Eastern Front, played an indispensable role in defeating Hitler, it should escape no one’s memory that he too was an evil, mass-murdering despot.

Stalin and communism should be universally reviled in the very same way as Hitler and Nazism. (Note also that Stalin only fought the Germans because Hitler invaded the USSR in violation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that divided Eastern Europe and enabled the Reich’s western incursions in the first place.)

Finally, no one doubts or discounts the bravery of the Russian and other Soviet soldiers fighting in defense of their homeland and families, far removed from the politics of terror that permeated their government — including my maternal grandfather, a tank captain who helped take Berlin. Accordingly, if we are to honor the Soviet role at our D-Day Memorial, we should honor the common Red Army soldiers — whom Stalin treated as disposable bullet-stoppers, many of whom he murdered after the war because they had witnessed the world beyond communism – not the tyrant and the murderous system they represented.

You can read about the collective amnesia — if not willful blindness — about the evils of communism that has set in among Western elites in Paul Hollander’s excellent Cato Development Policy Analysis.